Austria

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Jewish refugee from Vienna upon arrival in the United Kingdom (Photo)

A Jewish refugee girl from Vienna, Austria, upon arrival in Harwich after her arrival in England on a Kindertransport. United Kingdom, December 12, 1938.

Credits:

• National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD

Before World War II, Jews played an important role in Austria's economic and cultural life. In 1938, Austria had a Jewish population of about 192,000, representing almost 4 percent of the total population. The overwhelming majority of Austrian Jews lived in Vienna, the capital, an important center of Jewish culture, Zionism, and education. Jews comprised about 9 percent of the city's population. However, by December 1939 their number had been reduced to just 57,000, primarily due to emigration.

The Anschluss: The German Annexation of Austria

After a prolonged period of economic stagnation, political dictatorship, and intense Nazi propaganda inside Austria, German troops entered the country on March 12, 1938. They received the enthusiastic support of most of the population. Austria was incorporated into Germany the next day. In April, this German annexation was retroactively approved in a plebiscite that was manipulated to indicate that about 99 percent of the Austrian people wanted the union (known as the Anschluss) with Germany. Neither Jews nor Roma (Gypsies) were allowed to vote in the plebiscite.

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A crowd cheers Hitler in Vienna (Photo)

A cheering crowd greets Adolf Hitler as he enters Vienna. Austria, March 1938.

After a prolonged period of economic stagnation, political dictatorship, and intense Nazi propaganda inside Austria, German troops entered the country on March 12, 1938. They received the enthusiastic support of most of the population. Austria was incorporated into Germany the next day.

Credits:

• Wide World Photo

Following the Anschluss, the Germans quickly extended anti-Jewish legislation to Austria.

The Camp System in Austria

The Mauthausen concentration camp was established in the summer of 1938, after the German incorporation of Austria. Mauthausen became the main Nazi camp in Austria. It was built near an abandoned stone quarry, along the Danube River, about 12.5 miles southeast of Linz. The Germans designated the Mauthausen concentration camp a category III camp, indicating that it was a special penal camp with a harsh regimen. Inmates in the punishment detail, for example, were forced to carry heavy stone blocks up 186 steps from the camp quarry. The steps became known as the "Stairway of Death."

During the war, forced labor using concentration camp prisoners became increasingly important to German armaments production. In the summer and fall of 1944, subcamps under the administration of Mauthausen were established near armaments factories throughout northern Austria. The staff at Mauthausen administered more than 60 subcamps, including Gusen, Gunskirchen, Melk, Ebensee, and Amstetten. Thousands of prisoners were worked to death.

In addition to Mauthausen and its subcamps, other camps in Austria extended from Lochau in the west to Strasshof in the east.

The Kristallnacht Pogroms in Austria

The November 1938 Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogroms were particularly brutal in Austria. Most of the synagogues in Vienna were destroyed, burned in full view of fire departments and the public. Jewish businesses were also vandalized and ransacked. Thousands of Jews were arrested and deported to the Dachau or Buchenwald concentration camps. Jewish emigration increased dramatically in response to the German incorporation of Austria and to Kristallnacht. Between 1938 and 1940, 117,000 Jews left Austria.

Deportations from Austria

ID Card

Judith Gabriel Dichter (ID Card)

Judith, nicknamed Julie, was one of five children born to religious Hungarian-Jewish parents in the Burgenland, the eastern province of Austria that was part of Hungary until 1921. She married Tobias Dichter, a traveling salesman from Vienna who had sold merchandise to her father. The Dichters moved to an apartment in Vienna's Jewish Leopoldstadt district, where they raised two children.

1933-39: The Germans have annexed Austria. One week after the annexation, Germans came to Julie's apartment to take her husband and son but left after no one answered the door. Several months later, the Germans confiscated her husband's drugstore and all of its contents ("Aryanization"). Judith and Tobias have urged their children to leave Austria, but Judith and her husband are too old to immigrate. Anyway, the Germans will probably leave old people like them alone.

1940-42: Judith and Tobias have been deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Last June, for the second time in two years, they were forced to move out of their apartment in Vienna. They were ordered to leave their personal property behind and were put on a transport of 1,000 Jews, many of whom were elderly like them and many of whom they knew. At least their children are safe abroad, and Tobias and Judith are still together. Now, the Germans are telling them that they are to be moved to a work camp.

On September 19, 1942, Julie and her husband were deported to Maly Trostinets, a German killing site near Minsk. They were killed on arrival.

During World War II, German policy regarding the Jewish population shifted from one of expropriation and Jewish emigration to one of forced deportation. The Nazis deported thousands of Jews from Austria to occupied Poland and elsewhere in occupied eastern Europe.

Systematic mass deportations from Vienna, as elsewhere in Greater Germany, began in October 1941. The Nazis established centers where Jews were to be assembled before deportation. About 35,000 Jews were deported from Vienna to ghettos in eastern Europe, mostly to Minsk, Riga, and Lodz, and to ghettos in the Lublin region of Poland. Most Jews sent to Minsk and Riga were shot by detachments of the Einsatzgruppen shortly after arrival. Over 15,000 Viennese Jews were deported to Theresienstadt. Thousands of Jews were also sent to concentration camps in Germany. By November 1942 only about 7,000 Jews remained in Austria, mostly those married to non-Jews. Some Jews remained in hiding.

Soviet and American forces occupied Austria in April and May 1945.